More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About The Sega Dreamcast

The latest from the video game trivia masters at Did You Know Gaming? tackles Sega's ill-fated but fondly remembered Dreamcast -- from inception to downfall.

(Is it just me or is the rapid-fire pacing of this channel's video releases starting to get a little crazy?)

Anyway, the Dreamcast was not a bad system, but a perfect storm of factors led Sega to eventually discontinue it and ditch the game hardware business entirely. Everybody knows that.

But did you know that Sega made official Dreamcast light gun and camera accessories that it never released in the US? Or how about the fact that then-Sega Chairman Isao Ikawa appealed personally to Bill Gates in the hopes that Microsoft would build native Dreamcast game support into the Xbox after the Sega console's death?

These tidbits aren't breaking news, but there is so much information packed into the video that I can pretty confidently guarantee you'll learn something from it -- even if it's that you never wanted to know so much about the Dreamcast in the first place.

Wait, i always thought that Sony were partners with Nintendo before the PS1 and N64 were released, they only parted ways because Nintendo wanted to keep using cartridges over CD's, Sony investing too much money to simply dump their contribution developed the PS1.

I could possibly be (and probably are) wrong but this is what i always thought.

From what I remember, Sony was going to originally partner with Nintendo, but after discovering the fine print that would have entitled Sony to most of the royalties, Nintendo pulled out. Sony then turned to Sega, but as they said in this video, that fell through too. So after that, Sony decided to take them both on with the Playstation.

Yep, you are correct. The "facts" at the start of the video are complete nonsense. Considering the fact, too, that Dreamcast runs Hitachi SH-4 CPU and NEC Power-VR2 GPU, which was not even mentioned at all... Makes me wonder about their previous videos historical accuracy now, too.

"Anyway, the Dreamcast was an amazing system, but a perfect storm of factors led Sega to eventually discontinue it and ditch the game hardware business entirely. Everybody knows that."

That's a little better :P

My Dreamcast still gets a TON of use. The amount of gold in the Dreamcast library is staggering. I've recently started replaying Grandia II, and I've been meaning to hunt down a legit copy of Record of Lodoss War- a really neat ARPG that seems to have been completely forgotten to time.
Tokyo Highway Challenge/Xtreme Racer/Shutokō Battle 2 is also on high rotation. Anytime I turn that game on, it's days before I can bring myself to give it up again :)

Oh man. I bought Blue Stinger on release day, which was 2 days before the DC launch for some weird reason. I always felt like it was Resident Evil as an adventure game. So many great memories of that game. It was terrible in the best way.

I didn't have Blue Stinger. Lucky me had a different shitter - Trickstyle. I had too put up with it's mediocre anti-grav boarding until I could buy an actual game worth playing... but nothing was going to make me turn that PS1 back on. I'm in the future now :P